12 Killer Tips To Optimize Your Website

Written by: Jason Bayless | October 27, 2017

Competition on the internet has become fierce. You must do all that you can to level the playing field and ensure that your website gets seen. Here’s 12 killer tips on how to optimize your website so that it pulls ahead of others in the same niche.

Optimizing Images

By far, image optimization is the number one tweak that you can make on your website so that it loads faster. The majority of most websites are made up of images. Using lossless image compression is the best choice for images. It ensures that they don’t take up too much data, which helps them to quickly appear.

Utilize A Content Delivery Network

Your website will withstand traffic surges by utilizing a content delivery network. It stores your content in specified geographic locations so that when a user calls data from your website, it is delivered to them seamlessly by a content delivery network that is close to them. This reduces latency.

Stop Redirects

It is much faster for a user to see a specific webpage on your site when it is not redirected. 301 redirects drastically slow down the time that it takes for a webpage to appear in a user’s browser. Redirects add additional round-trip times that slow down the appearance of data.

Leverage Browser Caching

Assets on your website that stay static and don’t change should be cached. This would include your website banner and the images inside. It will also include any static images that are placed in widgets or sidebars. Caching cuts down on image loading and speeds up the appearance of your website’s content.

Consider HTTP/2

You might want to consider enabling HTTP/2. The HTTP network protocol is undergoing a major revision, and HTTP/2 has been shown to be faster in testing that has been done. You can change over to this new network protocol by obtaining an SSL certificate.

PHP 7

PHP is the backend language that is widely used by a multitude of servers on the internet. Like most programming languages, it is constantly being upgraded with new versions. Currently, PHP 7 is the latest version, and it handles requests faster than the older PHP 5.6 version.

Cut Custom Fonts

While custom web fonts may look pretty, they drastically cut into the performance of a website. It takes much longer to load a webpage that has custom fonts than it does one that is using a Georgia font. Cut out custom fonts and your website will load much faster.

Utilize Gzip Compression

Before your data goes over to a user’s browser, you can use Gzip to compress the folders and files. Gzip has the ability to compress JavaScript, CSS and all of the webpages on your site. This optimization trick is easy to implement and should boost performance.

Hosting

All hosting services are not the same. If you choose to use shared hosting, your website will probably not load as fast as a VPS or dedicated server. Consider the infrastructure that you are using to host your website as it is an important element in website loading speed.

Eliminate 404 Errors

404 errors waste running time on your server. This is an unneeded load on your server and can be easily fixed by using an external service to check for any broken links on your website. You simply need to run your website through one of these resources and fix the problems that appear.

Scale Your Images

Don’t rely on CSS code to change the appearance of images. It is better for page speed if you optimize and adjust the size of images before they are sent to the browser of a user. You do this by including an upload of different image sizes and resolutions that fit devices such as smartphones, tablets and computers.

Optimizing the Database

Over time, your database should be thoroughly cleaned and old tables should be eliminated. Unwanted and unused data is only in the way of the data that is required to load your site.”